Light and Vision
23
Land could write, too. As Polaroid grew, his letter to shareholders, published in the annual report, gradually became a particularly dramatic showcase for his language and his thinking. These letters—really more like personal mission statements—are thoughtful and compact, and just eccentric enough to be completely engaging. Instead of discussing earnings and growth, they laid out Land’s World, inviting everyone to join.4 They are an astonishing departure from the baggy corporate-speak of most annual reports. He cared about words nearly as much as he did about scientific rigor: When he elevated the marketing executive Ted Voss to become a corporate officer, Land gave him a four-word job description: “Keeper of the language.” Land’s first real bit of linguistic innovation appeared in 1934. As Peter Wensberg retells the story, Clarence Kennedy and Land were discussing a name for the company’s first product. Kennedy, with his classical education, offered “Epibolipol,” which was somehow supposed to convey “sheet polarizer” in Greek. (Epiboly is also a biological term involving the rapid growth of cells into a thin sheet, which is a little like the way crystals formed in Land’s invention.) That unpronounceable mess was vetoed. Kennedy then fell upon the suffix “-oid,” perhaps because it suggested a characteristic set of properties, as in “spheroid.” It also evoked the product’s celluloid base. Besides, it sounded niftily futuristic and hightech. Combine that with “polarizer,” he told Land, and you have a name. It wasn’t perfect. Until it became a household word, readers often transposed the vowels, mispronouncing it as “poyla-rode.” To this day people misspell it, swapping in an o for the a. But it stuck: Polaroid!
4 A transcript of the 1980 annual meeting includes this revealing exchange:
A shareholder asked Land about his goals when he’d been a young student. “Two things,” Land replied crisply. “I wanted to become the world’s greatest novelist. I wanted to become the world’s greatest scientist.”